dials; Starliner offers just a few dozen. The Starliner airframe starts life in the Boston area as individual spun-form aluminum upper and lower domes. They’re then machined with hundreds of pockets before being shipped to Florida’s “Space Coast.” After initial assembly, the dome sections are structurally fastened rather than welded as they were for the Apollo spacecraft, providing a lighter and production-friendly vehicle, said Danom Buck, Boeing manufacturing engineering manager. Engineers recently “designed out” even more weight from the new capsule to meet a mass optimization effort, Buck said. A team of engineers, technicians and mechanics will run Starliner’s first assembled vehicle through months of pressurized testing to verify the design and certify components—to ensure the workmanship is solid so that the ensuing Continued on Page 24 Photo: Technician Joel Andriola works inside the upper crew module dome for Starliner’s first test article, which will be transported from Florida to California for stress testing. 22 | BOEING FRONTIERS spacecraft can be built effectively. Team members join the upper and lower domes of the crew module in the high bay; they stack together the capsule and service module used for propulsion in the adjoining low bay. The spacecraft will carry 24 engines and 40 thrusters, enough power to reposition the much larger space station into a higher orbit or move it from the path of speeding space debris, if needed. Rusty Allen, who previously worked on the space shuttle and the Lockheed Martin Orion deep space capsule, is one of 17 technicians assigned to Starliner manufacturing. His expertise is propulsion. He finds the hardware installation similar from program to program, but says Starliner affords him easier access because of its two-piece crew module configuration, which speeds up the build. While the 25-year mechanic doesn’t lack for motivation
Frontiers October 2016 Issue
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